In today's photofinishing, digital image capture has played an increasing roll in providing greater flexibility to the user forwarding various image products. It has become quite popular to upload digital images to a photofinishing site such as Ofoto website (ofoto.com) wherein a user can store images and order image products such as photographic prints. Not only can the user order any desired number of prints, but the user can also order a wide variety of size prints and additional products. This provides the customer with a large latitude in ordering many different products. This however creates a problem for the service provider in determining the cost for shipping all of the orders back to many respective customers that have placed orders. This entails the need to weigh each and every shipping parcel in order to determine the appropriate shipping costs for each of the packages for each customer order. This requires a substantial amount of handling by the photofinisher which increases the cost that must be passed on to the consumer. Thus, there is a need to provide an efficient manner for determining the shipping cost for a wide variety of orders, each potentially having different shipping costs.